by Delaney, JP
“He loves this place,” Tim says, watching. “He used to spend hours down on the beach, jumping in the waves with you.”
“Maybe that’s something I can do with him tomorrow, then. I’d like that.”
Tim hesitates. “I’m afraid not. You going in the ocean would be like me taking my smartphone into the pool. Water—particularly salt water—would wreck you in a second.”
“Oh.” You think of your earlier self, the thousands of hours you spent on a board. That was why Tim built this house, after all—so you could be near your beloved ocean. And now even that’s off-limits.
“We might be able to address that, though, in time,” he adds. “And the hiking here is terrific. We should think about getting a dog—”
You shake your head. You don’t want a dog.
You make pasta. The four of you sit around the massive party-sized table on the sundeck to eat it, but conversation is fitful. You try to draw Sian out, but she seems to regard your questions as just some random computer-generated chitchat. Sometimes she ignores you altogether. Only when you ask her about Danny’s school does she become more animated. Meadowbank is, she says, exceptional, the only place in the whole state where kids like Danny get the consistency and intensity of support they need. The results there have been incredible.
You can’t help looking at Danny, who’s taking no part in the conversation, dreamily twirling a forkful of pasta tubes in front of his eyes before finally putting it in his mouth. Automatically, you smile at him—his fine, ethereal face is beautiful, whatever his condition—but incredible isn’t the word you’d have used.
“You should have seen him a few years ago,” Sian says defensively. “He was self-harming—headbanging, biting the backs of his hands, pulling out his hair…He’s made giant strides.”
“Of course,” you say quickly. “You’ve done a great job.”
Later, Tim and Sian clear the dishes while you stay with Danny. You’ve devised a simple game: You read one of his Thomas books out loud, but every now and then substitute a silly word for one of the originals—gorilla for train, say—or deliberately get Toby and Terence mixed up. Since Danny knows the text forward and backward, this is indescribably amusing to him. Sometimes he laughs so hard he can hardly make the thumbs-down sign, his way of saying Wrong.
“Thomas, you are a really useful elephant…”
You pause for effect. From the kitchen, you hear Sian say conversationally, “It’s incredible how quickly you forget she isn’t real. For a while back there it was just like talking with an ordinary person.”
Outraged, you wait for Tim to slap her down. But his reply is brief and noncommittal, a low rumble you can’t quite catch.
“Well, maybe you could train her to add a bit less salt to the pasta,” Sian adds primly. “Still a couple of things a robot can’t do as well as a human, I guess.”
Danny taps your arm insistently to make you go on mangling the story, and you don’t hear the rest.
After dinner, thankfully, Sian retires to her room with her laptop. You watch TV with Tim while Danny goes on playing with his trains, lining them up against the baseboard in endless, exact permutations.
“I’m sorry about the salt,” you say eventually.
“What? Oh, that. Don’t worry about it.”
“Sian doesn’t seem too keen on me.”
Tim shrugs. “She’s worried you’ll replace her, that’s all. She’ll come around.”
You hadn’t thought of it like that. “Replace her? Why?”
“If you think about it, therapy work’s another sector that’s ripe for automation. The whole point is to be consistent and repetitive. There’s plenty of evidence a bot could do that side of it far more effectively than a human.”
“Well, of course I’m not going to replace her. She’s good for Danny. And he likes her.” Even so, you feel better.
The news comes on. You’re the second item. “Tech titan Tim Scott, who four years ago was controversially cleared of murdering his wife Abigail, has created an eerie robotic replica of the missing woman—” It’s illustrated with a long-lens shot of you closing the blinds.
Abruptly, Tim raises the remote and the picture dies. “I’m going to bed,” he says with a sigh.
“We talked about uploading some wedding footage,” you remind him.
“Oh—so we did. We can set that up now.”
As you follow him upstairs you pass a painting on the landing. You stop to look at it more closely. It’s a portrait of Danny at a few months old, half asleep, one eye squinting lazily up at the viewer. It’s smaller than the other paintings around it, barely larger than a paperback. Even the brushstrokes are finer and more detailed, as if the painter’s whole world has shrunk to this tiny face, those dark eyes, the crinkle of soft, pouchy skin beneath each eyelid.
There is no way, you think, no way on God’s earth, that the woman who painted that portrait could have abandoned her son. No matter how trapped she felt, no matter what his diagnosis, she wouldn’t have left him.
You look up. Tim’s watching you intently.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he asks softly. “You feel what you felt when you were painting that.”
“I think anyone would. Any mother, anyway. It doesn’t mean I’m a mind reader.” Something makes you add, “Tim…those articles I read earlier. Were you checking my emails?”
“Of course not,” he says, clearly offended. “Why would I want to? We never had secrets from each other.”
You lie down in a bedroom and he hooks you up to a laptop. “It might take a while,” he warns. “The cable speeds out here are terrible.”
“That’s all right…And Tim?”
“Yes?”
“Would you kiss me before you go?”
“Of course.” He bends down and, tenderly, plants a kiss on your forehead. “Good night, my love. Enjoy the upload.”
“ ’Night.”
You close your eyes and let the elixir of memory flood your system, like an addict’s fix of heroin.
23
You dream it, and you don’t dream it. These uploaded memories are more vivid, and more painful, than any dream. For a few precious minutes you’re yourself again—seeing the world through your own eyes, thinking with your own mind. Complete, once more.
Your wedding was beautiful, but somewhat unconventional. That was one of the things you loved about Tim—he never did things a certain way just because everyone else did. This house, for example. It’s extraordinary—not just the location, but the building itself, surrounded by wild grass and rock in every direction, and screened from the highway by a gentle bluff. You could hardly believe it was his wedding gift to you.
For the day itself, the architects had built a wooden deck between the house and the edge of the cliff, and erected an open-sided marquee on it. Tim had let you plan everything except the venue. The tent was decorated with sprigs of wildflowers mixed with eagle feathers, and the guests sat on hay bales instead of chairs. Your dress was white and simple, like a Roman toga. Instead of a veil, you wore a diamond head-circlet from India, another gift from Tim, along with a crown of braided cornflowers. The whole ceremony was presided over by a humanist priestess.
Your vows. I give myself to you for all eternity…Yes, you really had said those words to each other. You hadn’t meant them literally, of course.
But even in the dream, you realize Tim did. That’s why you’re here.
And finally, reading Sonnet 116 together:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom…
That was doom in the old sense of the word, you remember telling Tim the first time you read the poem to him. Judgment Day. Eternity. Not the moment in a horror movie when someone meets the baddie.
In your dr
eam you can even smell everything. The rich, savory aroma of warm hay. The sweet drifting scent of the patchouli sticks you’d placed on the tables. The salty tang of the ocean. The occasional whiff of weed from behind the house, where some of your artist friends had slipped away for a spliff—
Then, abruptly, you’re going back; back to a few days before the wedding, and your last-minute jitters. The more you thought about it—really thought about it—the more you loathed the whole idea of marriage. What a brilliant way, historically, of controlling women! The woman gave herself to the man—or was given by her father—as his personal property. Her rights and feelings remained subservient to his, while at the same time power over reproduction—the only thing naturally controlled by her—got transferred to her husband as well. That’s the reason they called it wedlock! How could any woman who called herself a feminist agree to such a Neanderthal setup?
You phoned Tim at work and spilled your worries. He waited patiently until you were done, then said, “Fine. Let’s not get married then, Abs. Let’s just make our vows to each other someplace quiet, and go on as we are.”
“I don’t think I want that, either.”
“Well, whatever you do want is fine by me. Give me a minute,” you heard him say to someone at the other end.
“It’s just marriage itself, I think—the whole institution. I feel better now we’ve talked it through. I know our marriage isn’t going to be like that.”
“Good. Speaking of which, how’s my wedding gift coming along?”
“Nearly finished. How’s mine?”
He laughed. “Also nearly finished.”
“When are you going to tell me what it is?” He’d been teasing you with this gift for months.
“When you see it on our wedding day.”
“Will I get to unwrap it?”
“Hmm—might be a bit large for that. Gotta go now, Abs. There are people standing outside my office.”
“Let them stand.”
“I already did. You wouldn’t want me to be a tyrannical boss, would you?”
“They know you’re not, really.”
He laughed again. “I sincerely hope they don’t.”
“Oh, and Tim—”
24
You open your eyes. The memory has stalled, somehow, the images frozen in your head. You search for the reason. And then—clunk!—it comes to you.
Not enough bandwidth.
You wait, hoping the connection might resume, but nothing happens. It must be that dodgy internet Tim mentioned.
You unplug yourself and swing your legs onto the floor. You’ll go downstairs and find something else to do until the connection improves.
Quietly, so as not to wake anyone, you pad along the landing. There are sounds coming from Sian’s bedroom—grunts and moans. With a flash of surprise, mixed with amusement, you realize she’s watching porn. Not such a prim little thing after all.
And then you remember that broken internet connection and realize she can’t be. The thought has barely formed in your mind before the truth falls there instead, so stark and horrible that you gasp out loud.
You turn and look down the landing. The door to Tim’s room is open. You can see inside. The bed is empty.
“Yes!” Sian groans. “Yes!”
“Yes,” Tim agrees.
The door to her room is ajar. You don’t want to look but you can’t help yourself. She’s astride him, her back to you. There’s something repulsively triumphant about the way she grinds herself into him, luxuriating in her own pleasure, sweeping her hair back with one hand, then immediately leaning forward again so it curtains her face, resting her palms on his chest like someone doing CPR—
“Yes,” she moans again.
Yes, you think, pain and anguish battering you, toppling you off-balance so that you actually have to put one hand to the wall to stop yourself falling. Yes, of course. Of course something like this would happen.
“Yes,” Sian groans.
No.
No. No. No.
EIGHT
For a couple of weeks after the firebot, things pretty much went back to the way they’d been before. We thought about new and exciting ways to make the shopbots sell people stuff. (“Like, how awesome would it be if they could spot when you were wearing last year’s fashions, and call you out?” “Pretty awesome, actually.”) Abbie turned up in the mornings with her braids still wet and her surfboard strapped to the roof of her old Volvo. Tim, we thought, seemed unusually quiet—“Dormant. Like Vesuvius,” someone commented. He was often closeted in meetings with the money guys. Apparently our backers thought the shopbots were turning out too expensive. That made some of us worry about cost cutting, which might mean layoffs.
Then one day Megan Meyer turned up in her convertible Jaguar, closely followed by a couple of employees in a white van. From the back of the van they—the employees, anyway—unloaded a rack of clothes. Men’s clothes, we noticed as they wheeled it behind Megan’s elegant kitten heels to Tim’s office: sports jackets, merino knitwear, tan slacks.
So we gathered that Tim was having a style consult. That was something Megan regularly did for her clients. It wasn’t just about finding them dates: In Silicon Valley, where some of the wealthiest individuals were also the most socially dysfunctional, it was about teaching them how to date.
Later, after Megan had gone, Tim came out of his office. He was wearing a navy-blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, chinos, and brogues. No one said anything, of course. But for those of us who’d never seen him in anything except black jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a white baseball cap, the effect was strange; almost startling.
We noted that by the end of the day, he’d put the baseball cap back on.
The following morning, he came into work wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt again. We breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Mike, ever loyal, told us the style consult had been because Tim wanted to smarten himself up for an important meet-and-greet with some potential investors. Nobody really bought that, of course. But out of respect for Mike, we pretended we did.
That day Tim left the office at five o’clock. No one knew where he was. He’d stopped working early, Morag, his assistant, explained.
Again, we were confused. The whole idea that Tim might actually “stop working” was problematic. Tim sent us emails at three, four in the morning. He would call us on Sundays to yell at us for some tiny glitch he’d just spotted in our coding. He once famously phoned Gabriella Pisano while she was in the early stages of labor to locate a file he needed, having forgotten she was on maternity leave. Even when she told him that’s what she was doing, he didn’t hang up.
Abbie, meanwhile, was working on a new art piece. But we noticed she was also talking a lot to Rajesh. Rajesh was one of the developers, a quiet vegetarian in his mid-twenties no one knew a lot about. But when we saw the warmth blossoming between him and Abbie, we realized something we hadn’t noticed before: Rajesh was a very beautiful young man. And cool. Rajesh was one of those people whose quietness masked a deep inner confidence. Someone looked up his personnel record and discovered he’d received the Dean’s Award at Stanford.
Abbie’s new piece, when she unveiled it, was an installation of three leather punching bags suspended by thick ropes from the ceiling of one of the conference rooms. At first, no one knew what to make of it. Unlike the firebot, she didn’t present it to us. She simply left it there, along with three beaten-up pairs of boxing gloves. A small card on the wall said: GOLDILOCKS. LEATHER, ROPE, ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS.
It wasn’t long before someone pulled on the gloves and started hitting the larger of the punching bags. Then they stopped, surprised. The punching bag had cried out, as if in pain.
The puncher hit the punching bag again. “Ow!” the punching bag yelled. The puncher laughed, and rained a series of blows, Rocky-
style, left-right-left. Each time, the punching bag yelled and hollered.
Someone else joined in on the next punching bag. But they only landed one blow before they stopped, embarrassed. The second punching bag had also yelled out, but in a woman’s voice.
So we tried the third punching bag. This time it was a child who screamed.
No one wanted to go near the punching bags after that. We all agreed it was a much less successful art piece than the firebot. That had been fun, we decided. This one was making some kind of statement. It felt naïve and mean-spirited and a little bit obvious.
25
You stumble out of the beach house blindly, almost tripping over yourself in your haste to get away. You have no idea where you’re going. You just know you can’t stay there, in your house—the place where you got married—while your husband has sex with another woman.
Questions tumble through your mind. When did this start? Is Sian his girlfriend? His mistress? Have there been others?
How long was he even celibate for, after your death?
When you get to the security barrier and the fork in the drive, there’s only one way you can go. Turning right would take you to the highway. You have to go left, down toward the ocean.
Unlike the drive leading to your house, this road is old and potholed, zigzagging down a steep incline. You pass houses—not grand, ultramodern properties like yours, but smaller, older vacation homes. Most are in darkness. At the bottom, overlooking a rocky beach, is a ramshackle old diner. The windows are boarded up, their frames corroded from salt water.
You go and stand on the boardwalk, holding on to the rusty rail for support, staring miserably out to sea. Not for the first time, you find yourself wishing you could cry: anything to release these pent-up emotions. Instead you yell, something shapeless and wordless, your agony and despair flung out at the endless ocean, the wind ripping the sound from your mouth almost before it’s formed.